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Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried

37signals.com

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Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried

#61

Post by lionshare »

chegra wrote: post #59
rick_2047 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that the author has ever tried to undermine what diaspora is trying to do in any one word of the short article. What he has tried to tell everyone is what is essentially the best advice those people can ever get. Somebody has to put a reality check on things. I seriously believe that a reality check has to be put on the dream run the diaspora team is getting. Essentially they are getting money just for…

The thing about selling the dream is that everybody has a picture in their own minds that makes it exciting. If we were to put actual code to it, it doesn't look like what I had in mind. So, alot of people will then say it's junk. Now this 37 signal's guy might say hey, the expectations are too high. Yes it is. But like any it is a problem to be solved. Just off the top of my head frequent release of the progress wou…

hmmm... interesting. But really, to write some client software that stores and provides read/write of the common "social content" (pics, blog posts, writing on the wall etc) in common standard RESTful way is such a far fetched dream? It could be simple as www.mysite.com/diaspora/albums or www.mysite.com/diaspora/wall.

Even Obama can handle it. (Not to mention 4 dedicated CS grads)

Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried

#63

Post by rythie »

People are thinking about this wrong.

$170k = 4 young inexperienced people for a year to take on Facebook, WRONG.

This should be thought of an open source project, they should use the $170k to coordinate a large open source project to create this with experts from all over the web. I'm talking 40-80 regular contributors, 400 or more causal contributors. This is perfectly possible given the press they have gotten so far.

They need a leader, it's not clear to me which of the 4 is that leader, but they need one.

Also, whilst their eventual goal might be to take on Facebook, this is 5 years off at least. Facebook spent 2 years only in colleges and universities to get critical mass. Diaspora could try the same or work with niche interests like Ning does or do company social networks like Yammer do, to get started.

Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried

#65

Post by lionshare »

rythie wrote: post #63

People are thinking about this wrong. $170k = 4 young inexperienced people for a year to take on Facebook, WRONG. This should be thought of an open source project, they should use the $170k to coordinate a large open source project to create this with experts from all over the web. I'm talking 40-80 regular contributors, 400 or more causal contributors. This is perfectly possible given the press they have gotten so f…

True, true, true.

They will not take FB themselves, but this project will start the underlying infra. The "BitTornet" of social networks. Than we will need the clients, the eco system etc. But it's the first essential step.

And guess what? one of Diaspora's applications will be a distributed project management layer. And the FB of project management, Basecamp, will not like it.

So we better keep supporting it for the remaining 15 days than listening to a the "closed system" competitor(Fried).

Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried

#66

Post by chegra »

lionshare wrote: post #61
chegra wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about selling the dream is that everybody has a picture in their own minds that makes it exciting. If we were to put actual code to it, it doesn't look like what I had in mind. So, alot of people will then say it's junk. Now this 37 signal's guy might say hey, the expectations are too high. Yes it is. But like any it is a problem to be solved. Just off the top of my head frequent release of the progress wou…

hmmm... interesting. But really, to write some client software that stores and provides read/write of the common "social content" (pics, blog posts, writing on the wall etc) in common standard RESTful way is such a far fetched dream? It could be simple as www.mysite.com/diaspora/albums or www.mysite.com/diaspora/wall. Even Obama can handle it. (Not to mention 4 dedicated CS grads)

So, that is the picture you have in your head? See I would be disappoint with this. My idea of it was you have a node and you add stuff to your profile, then some body copies it, several copies all on different nodes, so at any given time your nodes is always available. And there is some kinda security encrytion for each node. No key = no node.

What I was trying to point out some people are going to be disappointed regardless. All there is to do is manage it.

Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried

#67

Post by ubernostrum »

_sh wrote: post #25
sscheper wrote: post #2

He forgot the fourth curse: "Your thirteen year-old sister will crap her pants when she's told to download a social "node" on her computer in order to tell her friends that Abercrombie is having a sale."

Your thirteen-year-old sister's "node" will live exactly where her email lives: on some ISP/hosting co. Using Diaspora should be no different than "downloading the facebook page to your computer and running it on your browser", for example.

Your thirteen-year-old sister's "node" will live exactly where her email lives: on some ISP/hosting co.

Instead of "on some ISP/hosting co.", you mean to say "Google".

If Diaspora ever takes off -- and the odds are stacked against it -- then it's a very safe bet that Google will simply host nodes for free. Which means Google will have access to all the info they already have on you, plus all the info Facebook would've had.

This does not lead to the Glorious Distributed People's Republic of Privacy.

Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried

#68

Post by lionshare »

chegra wrote: post #66
lionshare wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmmm... interesting. But really, to write some client software that stores and provides read/write of the common "social content" (pics, blog posts, writing on the wall etc) in common standard RESTful way is such a far fetched dream? It could be simple as www.mysite.com/diaspora/albums or www.mysite.com/diaspora/wall. Even Obama can handle it. (Not to mention 4 dedicated CS grads)

So, that is the picture you have in your head? See I would be disappoint with this. My idea of it was you have a node and you add stuff to your profile, then some body copies it, several copies all on different nodes, so at any given time your nodes is always available. And there is some kinda security encrytion for each node. No key = no node. What I was trying to point out some people are going to be disappointed r…

as long as the protocol is done right, applications are endless. TCP is maybe 30 years old? The copy is an issue - because once it's copied you can not fully control it, similar to Facebook.

Yes, there will be disappointments. But it's not "a curse", a healthy 250K seed-stage worth is not the end of the world, and as someone pointed here: it's an open source seed. It will grow. Fried should not bash them like that, unless he has some special interest - which he does. The Diaspora paradigm threatens his core business and he knows it.

Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried

#69

Post by ubernostrum »

Diaspora's going to do one of two things.

Option one, with approximately 98% probability, is "fail hard". A few geeks will run nodes and brag about it on places like HN, and that'll be it.

Option two is that Diaspora succeeds, which will require some way around making everyone run their own node; basically, some company with the infrastructure to step in and host services for people, for cheap or preferably free. If an existing company -- one which already offers services most people use -- were to do this and make it easy enough, they'd probably end up running a huge percentage of Diaspora.

What sort of company would do that, you ask? Why, the company which already has all the info Facebook doesn't know about you, and would love to get access to the info Facebook does. You know, that search engine with the colorful logo.

Re: Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried

#70

Post by joubert »

shadowsun7 wrote: post #40

> Expectations are too high Jason's third point is, I feel, the strongest. People aren't contributing to Diaspora because of Diaspora, they're contributing as an act against Facebook. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that. I'm not sure if that's a good thing. It's one thing to get in front of a movement and ride that to success. It's another to get in front of a movement that's predicated largely on hate. D…

Perhaps the node thing is a question of economics. Instead of a company forking out millions and millions and needing to generate revenue through ads or subs, distributing the cost (running a node) thinly amongst users might make more sense economically. Not sure how they plan on convincing non-geeks to do this though (google native client perhaps?)
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